I bought a laptop that wouldn't connect to wifi without the usb wifi dongle I bought with it. The dongle worked fine on windows 10 but I erased it and installed linux mint recently. Now the dongle doesn't seem to be detected by linux mint and as a result I can't connect to wifi. What should I do?(image of the saud dongle attached)

Look for drivers perhaps? Google and stuff

@alexbrooklyn Google isn't helping, believe me I started there

lsusb
dmesg

these are not detecting the device, right?

yeah

Look into the datasheet of the dongle about the chipset (the result might surprise you, as there are only a relative small amount of chipset manufacturers). This may help you. Also look under the section "Additional drivers" of Linux Mint, it may detect the hardware but not install the closed source drivers, if they are required.

@sbiewald unfortunately I don't have that because I bought the laptop as a 2bd hand one

I have tried lsusb on all ports and the 3rd showed Realtek

Reinstall Windows 10?

Run Linux in a VM.

@Demolishun living without wifi option sounds sweeter

@drac94 can't afford one

Being a zealot about technology is one way to express ignorance about technology.

@Demolishun I started with windows 10 remember, but it just kept getting worse each update till I had to get rid of it

Realtek hardware is often pretty crappy, but their drivers are absolute shit.

If you can't get it working, I'd recommend doing some research on what adapters/dongles will be compatible, and buying one of those instead.

I've had absolutely no luck with realtek, and tp-link wasn't much better. Get anything with an Atheros9k chipset. It won't disappoint.

I recently replaced a realtek nic on my desktop with a knockoff with an Intel chipset. It went from spotty with occasional kernel panics to rock solid. Just say no to realtek.

Did you check it's plugged in? (jk)
Order another cheap dongle that mentions compatibility with Linux?
Meanwhile tether the network from your phone.

Look up the model number of the dongle online, see which chipset it has, the search for the corresponding Linux driver module name. Linux has a few realtek drivers, you might need to enable and/or disable one of them manually. Or compile one.

Identify the model and the manufacturer,and look for the driver.
If you can't find a driver, download a Windows driver and use it with ndiswrapper

@Haxk20 nope. In often cases hw will not be detected if its drivers are missing/incompatible. Tho it's a pain to find drivers if you don't know device details :)

happened to me with usb tv dongle, usbc dock on rpi w/ raspbian buster, DA-100 on some old-ass kernel, some other gadgets. Dmesg and lsusb started seeing them after installing required drivers.

@Haxk20 I used to think so too. My last such case was a realtek's wifi antenna [dongle]. It was not to be seen anywhere until I got those drivers installed a few weeks ago